Rico’s Bravely Default Guide: Universal Boss Guide

So you’ve leveled to your heart’s desire and have more money than the merchantry. But you find yourself stuck on a particular pain in the buttocks boss. I’ve not yet beaten the entire game but I have found a strategy that has worked on every single boss up to the point where I am (I should be nearing the end as I have most of the jobs unlocked).

Again this will be spoiler light. Because it works for anything that isn’t undead and anything that IS undead has an even simpler fix. If you go up against something that is undead just drop a Phoenix Down on it to instantly kill it (if it hits). You might think it strange that I’d title the post after that little strategy, and it would be strange, but that’s not what I’ve done. What we are getting into involves two job classes. The Spell Fencer and the Monk.

What you need for this strategy

Each of your characters need to know “Life Drain” from Spell Fencing.

Each of your characters need to know “Phoenix Flight” from Monk.

Probably wise to equip “Blessed Shield” on each of them.

Optional: Each of your characters can add “Revenge” from Red Mage.

Weapon doesn’t matter.

The more HP you can give your characters the better. This is because of the nature of “Phoenix Flight”. PF does “Reduce HP to 1 and convert the amount of HP sacrificed into damage applied to target enemy.” This on the face of it means that you wouldn’t want to do it 4 times in a row because it would do thousands of damage then 1 damage 3 times. But consider if we have our second job class being Spell Fencer and we use Life Drain the turn before.

Life Drain (I believe its just called Drain) causes you to convert 100% of your damage into life. So let’s imagine you’ve leveled your characters up to have about 5000 life after all their HP buffs are taken into account. They’ll deal 5,000 damage and then immediately gain back 5,000 life putting them back at max. If you brave with them 3 times that will be 20,000 damage from one character in a single turn.

Spread that across all four of your characters and you’ve just done 80,000 damage in a single turn. This isn’t quite enough to kill a few of the bosses outright as they have 100,000 life or 20,000 life. An ideal extra to this setup is to get “Revenge” from Red Mage level 11.

Revenge adds the following effect “Has a 25% chance to increase BP by 1 when taking damage.” This means that if you do go all in (I usually do this with only a single character and the other 3 spamming Blessed Shields) you will recover your BP extremely quickly in the following barrage of attacks by your opponent. It says that it activates only 25% of the time but I have an astoundingly high proc rate in my experience. Perhaps it is just luck.

The Blessed Shield provides you with an infinite supply of “Cura” which is incredibly helpful. If you keep healing your team each turn and just pumping out 20,000 damage every 4 turns with your 4th you’ll drop basically any boss up till the scary things on the world map. But even those things (which I won’t name) can be dropped with this method (I’ve done it).

Additionally if you want you can pump out an addition 10-20K damage with Bravely Second bringing a single turn of pounding up to 100,000 which will drop most job class bosses or quite nearly kill them.

It’s an easy strategy that is incredibly fun (for me) to do. You feel really great when your doing a defense and default ignoring 100% hitting 5K strike 4 times in a row. I’ve not once seen this move miss even with blindness and evasion up on my enemy. It MIGHT miss, but I’ve yet to see it happen. It also requires 0 extra BP or SP which means you can spam it willy nilly. The only SP loss is from the Drain and you can add “SP Gain on Hit” to your abilities if you’ve unlocked it to regain that in combat.

Sometimes a character will get cheesed and die instantly but you can res them and just grind it out. My worst experiences have been with bosses that “predict” who will hit them and kill that person or bosses that have additional “Damage every X turns at start of turns” effects as those reduce the impact of your attack because you are weaker. Yet I’ve only had to redo a boss fight once (soon to be twice) and both times it was only because I was OHKO’d across my entire team by cheese.

If you don’t get cheesed you can easily rule the world with this simple strategy :).

Edit: If you happen to be up against a tiny masochist and their keeper, I believe the strategy there is to use reflect so as to have them kill themselves with their extremely cheesy cheese. I haven’t tested it but it seems far too obvious to not be the case. You’ll know who I mean when they trounce you with no warning and no means of survival :p.

Sharing is daring and you are Batman.

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4 Comments on Rico’s Bravely Default Guide: Universal Boss Guide

Margaret Jaffe

I’m not sure if you have a different version of the game than me, but I can’t find “life drain.” Sure, Spellcaster has the job ability “drain,” but it’s just like the vamp’s “blood thirst”? I’m now trying to take out the Rosso/Victor team and haven’t tried this above strategy before, since I always kept thinking, “where’s ‘drain?'”